Riches v News Group Newspapers Ltd
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | LORD JUSTICE STEPHENSON,LORD JUSTICE PARKER,MR. JUSTICE PARK |
| Judgment Date | 20 February 1985 |
| Judgment citation (vLex) | [1985] EWCA Civ J0220-2 |
| Docket Number | 85/0060 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Date | 20 February 1985 |
[1985] EWCA Civ J0220-2
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
(MR. JUSTICE COMYN)
Lord Justice Stephenson
Lord Justice Parker
and
Mr. Justice Park
85/0060
1979 R No. 1288
MR. R. ALEXANDER QC, MR. CHARLES GRAY QC AND MR. A. MANSON (instructed by Messrs. Allen & Overy, Solicitors, London EC2V 6AD) appeared on behalf of the Defendants (Appellants)
MR. DAVID EADY QC and MR. S. SUTTLE (instructed by Messrs. Russell Jones & Walker, Solicitors, London WC1X 8DH) appeared on behalf of the Plaintiffs (Respondents)
The defendants are the proprietors and publishers of the News of the World, a national newspaper with a very large circulation in England and Wales. They appeal against a jury's award of exemplary damages amounting to £250,000, which they were ordered to pay to ten police officers by Mr. Justice Comyn on 9th February 1984 for libel contained in an article which they published in every edition of their newspaper on 16th July 1978.
As drawn up and perfected the judgment provided that the defendants pay the plaintiffs the sum of £253,000 with the costs of each of the plaintiffs of the action to be taxed. There should have been a judgment for payment of the sum of £25,300 to each of the ten plaintiffs with costs, in accordance with the jury's answers to the two questions they were asked:
(1) For whom do you find, the plaintiffs or the defendants?
(2) If for the plaintiffs what damages for each plaintiff?
The sum of £25,300 was in each case made up of £300 compensatory damages and £25,000 exemplary damages, as stated by the jury in answer to a question from the learned judge.
By a notice of appeal, which has been amended by a supplementary notice under Rules of the Supreme Court 0. 59 r.7(l)(b) and re-amended by leave of the court at the hearing of the appeal, the defendants appeal only against the award of the £250,000, those ten awards of £25,000, on 13 grounds. They do not appeal against liability or against the award of £3,000, those ten awards of £300. The plaintiffs cross-appeal against the award of only £300 to each of them, and ask for a new trial as to their entitlement to compensatory damages if a new trial is ordered. That has led the defendants, who were asking for the award of exemplary damages to be quashed or alternatively for a new trial as to the plaintiffs' entitlement to exemplary damages, to ask in the further alternative (in the event of both the appeal and cross-appeal being allowed) for a new trial to be ordered as to liability and damages.
The trial of the police officers' action took a long time to come to trial, largely through an unfortunate misunderstanding on the part of their solicitors and through no fault of the defendants or their advisers. It originated in a letter to the defendants, written on his behalf and signed by one David John Brain of his own free will according to its postscript, and received by them as long ago as 12th July 1978. The letter stated that he was the father of the missing child Mark Brain (who had been taken from his mother's home in Oxford) and pleaded with the defendants to help them in a case where he was being accused and charged with offences against his wife; offences of raping and badly treating his wife which had, he alleged, been committed by the Banbury CID; that strong evidence against Banbury CID had gone missing, apparently because of a sexual approach by a detective whom he named, and that his wife was too terrified to give evidence against certain CID officers of Banbury. He said that the newspapers and A10 (Scotland Yard's Police Discipline Department) were the only ones that could help and prove his innocence and on the sixth page of what was a rather rambling letter he said he would get in touch with the defendants once his story had been printed and would give the address of Mark and himself and the names of the witnesses. He ended with the sentence "I am living on the edge of my nerves, in the name of God help me".
The defendants promptly and properly sent a copy of this letter to the police. The day after the defendants received it Brain and his son were traced to a house in the Oxfordshire village of North Aston near Banbury and the so-called siege began. Brain was then holding his son and a woman hostage with a shotgun and a knife in deference to the allegations made against the Banbury CID in his letter, the siege was conducted by officers of the Thames Valley Police Force. After the woman held hostage had been voluntarily replaced by a friend of Brain and several days had passed during which he frequently shouted that he had grievances against the police, called for newspapers and asked to speak to a News of the World reporter, he surrendered peacefully. He subsequently pleaded guilty at Reading Crown Court to various offences, including unlawful possession of a firearm, and was detained at Broadmoor Hospital under an order made under S.60 of the Mental Health Act 1959 on 25th June 1979. At the committal proceedings he publicly withdrew his allegations against the police.
It is unnecessary, and inadvisable, to read the article of which the plaintiffs complain. It opened with a quotation of the last sentence of Brain's letter which I have already quoted, and stated that the letter revealed "a mind tormented by suspicion". It made copious extracts from the letter, including its allegations against the Banbury CID, but omitted the name of the officer mentioned in the letter. It ended with quotations from what the reporter had been told by Mr. Colin Smith, assistant chief constable of Thames Valley Police—that Brain's words kept changing from relatively calm to quite agitated and the police were "making a thorough investigation of the allegations in the letter sent to the News of the World". The article was not advertised by placard or poster or on television, but it appeared on the front page of every copy in every edition under the heading in very large heavy type: "EXCLUSIVE: SIEGE MAN TELLS US WHY HE DID IT".
The Banbury CID numbered at the time twelve officers (there is no evidence that the defendants or their reporter knew the number), including the officer named in the letter and one woman. The woman made no complaint; the named officer made a complaint but took no proceedings. The remaining ten brought their action by writ issued on 3rd May 1979 claiming damages and an injunction. Their claim included (in paragraph 6 of their statement of claim) a claim for exemplary damages in these terms:
"The Plaintiffs hereby give notice that at the trial of this action they will invite the Court to award exemplary damages on the basis that the Defendants published the words complained of with guilty knowledge, in the sense that they were obviously defamatory on their face, for the motive that the chances of economic advantages outweighed the chances of economic penalty. The Plaintiffs will invite the Court to draw this inference as to the Defendants' notice from the eye-catching headline and the prominence which the article was given, which can only have been for the purpose of boosting the newspaper's sales".
By amendment they added a claim for aggravated damages in these terms:
"Further, the Plaintiffs will rely in aggravation of damages upon the Defendants' omission to report Brain's public withdrawal at his committal proceedings of the allegations which he had made against the Plaintiffs in the letter he sent to the Defendants and also upon the Defendants' omission to report the praise of the Judge at Brain's trial for the way in which the police had handled the case".
By their defence of 15th June 1979 the defendants denied that the words complained of referred to, or were capable of referring to, the plaintiffs and were defamatory or capable of being defamtory; and they also pleaded qualified privilege by virtue of S.7(l) and paragraph 12 of Part II of the Schedule to the Defamation Act 1952, altered by amendment to a plea of qualified privilege at common law. They specifically denied that the plaintiffs were entitled to aggravated or exemplary damages.
The judge rejected the defendants' plea of qualified privilege at the end of the evidence and they do not appeal on that point. They maintained throughout that the article was not defamatory of the plaintiffs because no reasonable reader could take its allegations seriously but would regard them as the outpourings of a mentally disturbed man. The question of defamatory meaning was left to the jury and decided against them by the jury; there is no appeal on that point either. They also maintained and still maintain that the plaintiffs are not entitled to exemplary damages. The judge ruled against their counsel's submission that he should direct the jury that they could not award exemplary damages because there was no evidence on which such an award could properly be based; the jury did award them and the first issue in this appeal is whether this ruling was right. (There is no argument on aggravated damages and no means of ascertaining whether the jury awarded any).
Involved in the first question whether there was any evidence from which the jury could properly infer a case for exemplary damages is the question whether the defendants, in the person of Mr. Shrimsley, the editor of the News of the World who authorised publication of the article, believed, contrary to the jury's view, that no reasonable reader could take...
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